


A Song in Your Head

by Helena_Hathaway



Category: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Chance Meetings, College drop out, Depressing Thoughts Disguised With Humor, Eventual Happy Ending, Frerard, Funny, Humor, INDEFINITE HIATUS, Inspired by Music, M/M, Music, Side Peterick, Social Anxiety, There's literally no tags to describe this one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-24
Updated: 2015-05-05
Packaged: 2018-03-19 08:39:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3603618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helena_Hathaway/pseuds/Helena_Hathaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe getting a song stuck in your head just means that somewhere your soulmate is listening to that very same song.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Concerning Vitamins: Frank

**Author's Note:**

> [](http://s1291.photobucket.com/user/Sexy_Bread_Tin/media/ASIYH_zps6zxnn9fh.png.html)  
>  Look how pretty my cover art is.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I am trying something new.

Sometimes the recipe for a love story is as simple as a Beatles song. Or maybe it’s a Queen song, or The Misfits. Hell, if it floats your boat, maybe it’s a Taylor Swift song. Really, it’s all based on the individual’s merit and their environment. 

Everyone’s different, and there’s probably some mathematical formula that could predict a songs success according to it’s beat per minute or something incredibly complicated like that, but then you’re just soaking the fun out of it. Yes, that may be true, maybe there’s some magical line connecting every human to what they will inevitably find catchy, but sometimes, you just want to turn on the radio and sing a shitty pop song at the top of your lungs. Math has no place in music. Math has no place anywhere, really, math is difficult and it is a leading cause of hysterical crying. Math should just be completely abolished and replaced with the guitar solo from Stairway to Heaven. No one would complain.

The point is that music has a way of bringing people together. It’s not necessarily because of some higher power pushing you towards people, unless you want to believe that. Mainly, it’s just because people are attracted to people who share their same interests. This doesn’t have to be in a romantic sense, but come on, who are we kidding? Everyone wants to date someone who has the same iPod as themselves. They may deny it and they may say that they want to find someone with diverse interests, but what the hell are you going to talk about? If you can’t discuss the arch of David Bowie’s eyebrows with your mate, than what else are you going to talk about? Politics? No thank you.

There is something magical in music. Those words have been said before, and they will be said again, but sometimes it’s okay to repeat a phrase over and over again, because their words have lost no validity in the thousands of times they’ve been put on repeat. Also, it’s vital that everyone can understand this, as it’s one of the things that make humans human. It’ll never stop being true, so it should never stop being celebrated. Music is beyond a feeling. It’s beyond an emotion, and it’s pretty much beyond any worldly form altogether. Music is celestial, in a way, in the way that it brings people together and also makes people want to tear each other apart sometimes. But nothing else has that power. Except maybe Girl Scout Cookies.

It could be said that music is a reminder that the world isn’t all bad. Even in the darkest days, there’s something to be felt. There’s always something, someone, on the other end of a song who knows precisely what you’re feeling. To some, that’s all the relief that you need. To others, it’s the extra kick to get you out the door. To some, however, it can be lost, and these people are worth pity to the extreme.

The best way to describe music is that it provides a balance. It provides a comfort that can help to balance out the bad and the good. It’s sort of a lull that some don’t appreciate enough, and some appreciate just enough, but it’s an entity that we all crave at our bedside.

If there’s one thing that you spend your entire life chasing after, it’s the perfect balance of things. That’s a broad concept to take on alone, but that’s the short version of what everyone wants. You want a balance between your job, your family, your loves, your dislikes, and all the little things that you never notice. The little things are what wrap up the canvas. Like the extra splash of cover, and the little things consist of the sound of the birds when you wake up in the morning, to the smell of a neighbor starting a bonfire. 

Really, what we all want is a balance in those things. You need that balance, that’s what keeps you sane. A balance can’t be made with the tone of a song, but it can be aided. Every emotion there is to feel has been felt before, and that’s one thing that _does_ bind us all together.

The sad thing is that we’re never given that opportunity. No one is ever handed the opportunity for balance on a silver platter the way they should be. You’re instead trimmed and put in the hurdle of a straightjacket. And you can’t see the damn straightjacket until it’s too late to take back all the years you’ve lost. Because you will lose years, oh will you lose them. You lose years like you do hair from atop your head, and you have no choice. No one is ever given a choice. In every facet of life, no matter where you’re from, this is inescapable. That doesn’t make it okay, but it makes it mandatory.

On one end of the earth your straightjacket is school and work. On another side it’s money. A few doors down from you it’s disease, and to your immediate left, it’s the noose of anxiety. Everyone has a straightjacket and recognizing that is something that’s also inevitable, but that doesn’t mean you let your dream of balance become lesser, because dreaming truly is the only way for you to get anywhere. Hard work, yes, but you can’t achieve hard work without the dream to back it up. 

For our purposes now, we’ll focus on the straightjacket of the middleclass. This is one of the most common hitches for a person to have, but that doesn’t make it any less stifling. A middleclass straightjacket is the kind where you’re shipped to school at the age of five. From there you will spend your next thirteen to twenty one years also in school. At this point, it’s likely you’ll have three months, if that, of peace, and then you are thrust into finding employment. Maybe you’ve settled down with someone by now, but it’s not all that likely, and it may have shattered by now as well. From here you will spend the rest of your life in a likely incredibly repetitive state known by very few as zombie syndrome. Zombie syndrome is the act of doing the same thing every goddamn day for so long that you’re worn out to a point where you can no longer be classifiable as human. Zombie syndrome, though not necessarily inexorable, is a fate that some might consider worse than death. It’s common amongst cubicle workers, and should be abolished completely as it benefits no one.

The thing about humans is that we are a very persistent bunch. That’s probably our best trait, come to think of it. We keep going. We keep pushing through it, looking for that balance. We can laugh, or smile, or maybe even be happy, but the balanced life we were put on this earth to look for is now nothing but a distant memory. We’re a very hungry bunch though, because we keep moving forward.

But hey, that’s life. It’s messy, it’s boring, it’s commonly mindless, and it’s terminal. And it is fucking fantastic.

But the thing is that when you spend your entire life focused on one thing, one tiny little thing that really isn’t all that important when it comes down to it, you forget to think about other things. Basically, you get so caught up in the drama that you’re supposed to be thinking about that you let half of your life float by you and pay no mind to most of what’s going on around you.

This is precisely the reason why Frank dropped out of school. He’d realized a few months into his second year at university that he hadn’t _done_ anything. He’s never seen the world, he’s never been in a serious relationship, and he’s never gotten drunk off his tits and been unable to recall what happened the next day. He’s never lived by himself, nor has he ever actually supported himself, and really, the job he had at Wendy’s in Junior year of high school didn’t provide much of an income or much work experience, so it could be argued that he never really had a job.

Honestly, now’s not that much better. He still has never lived on his own, he has a pretty shitty job that barely pays more than that god-awful Wendy’s, but at least he’s got a life that isn’t controlled by the insistent shrill voices of his parents, and the judgmental society that conditioned him to believe that the only important thing in the world was education. 

Fuck education though. Fuck it to hell, and let it rot where it is. Frank hates school. He hates condescending professors who think they’re better than you because they have an expensive leather briefcase with those loud brass clasps. Fuck their mentality that the only thing that matters is their paycheck which they can use to buy fancy liquors imported from France or fucking Luxembourg. Frank’s knowledge of fine liquors is basically confined to what he’s learned from Jeopardy, as that’s really his only source of new information these days.

At least he can say that he’s got somewhat of a life now. It’s not a great life, and it’s not even really all that _good_ , but it’s a life all the same, and that’s what counts. True, he is living on the couch of the old high school punk that he used to idolize for some reason, but at least he isn’t stuck in that lame bedroom at home where he wasn’t allowed to put posters on the walls because it would damage the paint and lower the price of future resale. Like he fucking cares.

To be fair, Pete isn’t a bad roommate, but he’s also not really a roommate either, because Frank is living on a couch. A couch isn’t really a room, so to say he’s a roommate would not be entirely accurate. He’s the guy who makes sure Frank isn’t homeless and also the guy who sometimes makes toast at three in the morning because his work hours are fucked up, but that’s what happens when you have literally no money at all whatsoever. You end up on a guy’s couch listening to the sound of the tenants upstairs having loud sex. You also end up playing that scratched up Cranberries CD, because your roommate accidentally spilled orange juice on your iPod dock, and you both sold the majority of your CD collections on EBay because you needed money for Easy Mac. Then you’re forced to question why your roommate has a Cranberries CD in the first place, because that seems really out of place in the home of a man who once threw a bra his ex-girlfriend left in his apartment at Billy Corgan.

Frank’s days have all made a habit of melting together though. At least when he was in school he had the ability to tell you what day it was based on what assignments he had due, but now, days have very little room for change. He wakes up, he eats a handful of cereal, he checks to make sure that his clothes don’t smell too awful, he goes to work for most of the day, he comes back to Pete’s apartment and they play a ping pong tournament of comparing who’s had a worse day. Pete will come out with this shitty thing that happened, and Frank will combat it with that shitty thing that happened. The day ends with someone passing out due to lack of sleep, and then you press repeat. Frank’s absolutely horrified that he’s devolving into a life of zombie syndrome, but he refuses to ever let it get that far. So what if the only toothbrush he owns is the Buzz Lightyear one that was on clearance at Walmart? It still beats school.

Frank has the worst job probably known to man though. Or at least, he likes to think so. No one ever considers that there is someone in the world who has that job that you can never imagine anyone having. There is someone out there whose life revolves around the job that you never think anyone has, but someone’s got to have it, otherwise it wouldn’t get done. That is how Frank ended up working at a vitamin store. A _vitamin_ store. A store whose sole purpose is to sell _vitamins_. It’s probably the stupidest job known to man, and Frank detests it with that much vehemence.

First of all, the place is really white. That can be taken in both meanings of the phrase. For one, the store has white walls, white floors, white shelves full of white bottles with white vitamins inside. The price tags on the shelves are white, the uniforms are white, and the ceiling lights are a bright white reminiscent of the kind you would find in a surgical operating room. 

The other meaning that can be extracted from ‘white’ would be the fact that only white people buy vitamins. And, yes, it’s the _white people_ kind of white people. The ones who have names like ‘Deborah’ and ‘Barbara’ and ‘Debra’ who coach soccer teams and feed their children orange slices. That kind of white people. Suburban moms who drill heteronormativity into the minds of their toddlers so furiously that the only hope those kids have is to runaway to join a circus. That kind of white people. The kind of white people who call any form of rap music filth. That kind of white people. The kind of white people that have at least four sculptures or paintings of Jesus Christ in their living room. That kind of white people.

It’s only women who shop there too, because no ‘self-respecting male’ would ever be caught dead buying fish oil and calcium. Technically that’s not actually true, because there is one other class of people who go into a vitamin store. The hulks. That’s what Frank calls them. The hulks are the guys who spend three fourths of their life inside of gyms, bulking themselves up until they look like the cartoons from the wet dreams of overcompensating misogynists in the sixties. These men have been formally dubbed ‘comic book artists.’ Frank’s not a cynic, he’s not, he just knows that the portrayal of these such hulks is wrung from the minds of men who grew up making sandwich jokes towards half of the world’s population. It’s an industry that was predominately plagued with chauvinists in its early years. It should also be noted that Frank has double standards because he still eats comic books up like they’re the air he breathes.

The hulks buy just about anything that they can fit into their big meaty hands, which are always slick with perspiration from the workout they’ve been having for the last six and a half days. The hulks always saunter into that store, refuse any form of eye contact with their petite soccer mom counterparts, and they buy their shit as quickly as they can. Frank’s theory is that they can’t spend too much time buying vitamins because they’re losing valuable time that could be spent under a barbell. If you ask Frank, their time would be better spent under an anvil.

Those are the only two classes of people who go to vitamin shops. Occasionally you’ll get the uncomfortable looking people who have surely just come from the doctor’s office after being diagnosed with some minor disorder that requires vitamins. Frank can’t count the number of vampires who have come in, bought iron and left. If there was one disease he would most easily be able to prescribe, it’d be anemia. Frank’s an expert on it almost. The paler you are, the easier it is to predict what vitamins you’re there to buy.

Frank hates his job with a fiery passion equal to that as his hate for the shrill sound of Deborah’s voice as she asks what the best vitamin for weight loss is. Frank will casually tell her that he doesn’t know, he only works there, he doesn’t have an encyclopedia of knowledge about the products. She and her clones will always give him that same bad smell under their nose look, and huff before buying a lifetime supply of whatever it is that comes in those weird little brown bottles that they keep near the back of the store. 

A lot of his life Frank hates. He likes it better than his old life, though, which was filled with school assignments, tests, studying, stress, panic attacks, sleeplessness, pressure, and, most of all, self-loathing. At least he’s finally trying. That’s what really matters.

Frank sighs, looking around the apartment, that isn’t big enough for one person let alone two, and the occasional drifter from Pete’s past whose names have all drifted together. Frank is not good with names. He’s good with people, he can get along with anyone for at least a few minutes, but he just can’t remember names. He sat next to this kid in class once and they talked all the time between lectures, but he didn’t know his name, and eventually, he decided it was too late to ask. This was the reason for why Frank avoided that guy whenever he called to him in the library, and the reason for why he eventually decided Frank was a complete bitch and started to sit on the other side of the classroom.

The front door slams closed, prompting Frank to look around when he sees a very drowsy, and possibly hungover Pete walking into the apartment.

“You look a mess,” Frank states.

“You can talk. Your face is all blurry,” Pete says, stopping when he enters the kitchen. He looks around for a second, then walks over to the fridge. He opens it and Frank watches him as he stares at the contents of the refrigerator, his back turned to Frank. 

“You drunk?”

“I’m tipsy.”

“That’s what a drunk person would say,” Frank says.

“I’m only a little tipsy,” Pete says, “but go ahead, call the fire marshals, alert the sheriff. Make me walk in a straight line.”

“I don’t think that’s what those jobs are for.”

“Yeah, well whatever,” Pete says, finally deciding not to get anything from the fridge, so he turns around, letting it close by itself. “Going to bed.”

“It’s nine in the morning.”

“Going to bed,” Pete repeats, walking over to the door to the right of where Frank sits on the couch. He watches Pete enter, turn around, and he starts to yawn when the door is closed. Frank just shrugs, looking around.

Frank’s work schedule is irregular. He doesn’t have a normal one, he usually works five days a week, but there’s really no telling what those days will be. It’s slightly erratic, very confusing, and it keeps Frank on the brink of pissed more often than not. 

Today though, he doesn’t have work. That’s good for him. He has the entire day to do what he does best. Nothing.

Frank’s very good at nothing. He’s very good at consuming a colossal number of potato chips, watching a massive amount of shit TV, and standing up fewer than two times in seven hours. He could stay sitting for all of that time if he didn’t have a bladder the size of a walnut. 

He looks around him for a shirt that he can wear that doesn’t smell like it hasn’t been washed in six months. There’s a laundry room in the basement, which would be really nice if it weren’t the most horrific laundry room in the world. Frank is absolutely positive he saw a rat skeleton down there once. It’s the place where all your nightmares come alive, and he’s not sure that there isn’t a secret sewer entrance to some underground scummy parallel universe. Then again, most of the crap television that Frank watches is on the sci-fi channel so this suspicion is probably the result of his twisted imagination as well as the many episodes of Warehouse 13 he has consumed. Nevertheless, Frank refuses to use that laundry room, and instead walks the three blocks to the laundromat by the drugstore. 

Frank spots a shirt, one of the ones he’s pretty sure he paid less than five bucks for at a flea market, and picks it up. He does the sniff check which is never a very good idea. It smells like a twenty year old, technically homeless boy’s shirt, which is, in a sense, good, because that’s precisely what it is. Frank’s not really homeless, he has a roof over his head, but he doesn’t have a home, which is what makes him _technically_ homeless.

He frowns, looking at the shirt that’s beyond help with the way that it’s so wrought with deodorant stains, as well as the way it’s faded from the wash that it’s almost got a different design to the one it had when he purchased it. It’s not that he intentionally ruins things, he’s just not good at anything to do with numbers. Quantity is something that is virtually lost on him. He never knows how much laundry detergent is too much, and the same applies to deodorant. 

He looks around, wondering what he’s going to do today. He doesn’t have any friends that he has an obligation to hang out with anytime soon, Pete’s asleep, he really doesn’t want to just watch TV, but he has no money. Frank doesn’t know what there is to do with the day, and he’s wary of the prospect of trying to figure something out.

He settles on pulling out his ear buds from where they’re lying under a stack of books on the kitchen counter, and pressing them into his somewhat reluctant ears because he’s too poor to buy headphones and his ears are too small to wear earbuds. He keeps telling himself that he’ll buy a cheap pair of earphones next paycheck, but he hasn’t done it yet. His life is just a continued example of ‘I’ll do that someday in the future.’

Frank’s a grab bag kind of guy. He likes to throw things blindly and see where they land. He likes to take different routes to see how lost he can get himself. He likes to take a stab in the dark with what music he’s about to hear, and today is no different. He turns his iPod to shuffle, jumps over the couch to sit down, and lets Eleanor Rigby overtake him.

And his life itself is as simple as a Beatles song.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm thinking of making this fic semi-interactive. What I mean to say is that each chapter is going to end with a different song, and I might take suggestions as to what that song is. It's a possibility, but for now, I'd like to know what you think of the first chapter.


	2. Introducing Seymour: Gerard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gerard is codependent on coffee and a houseplant.

Gerard is woken up by the sound of a hissing teapot.

It would be inappropriate to say ‘woken up’ really, as he was awake fifteen minutes ago when he put said teapot on the stove. He’s been very tired lately. He’ll fall asleep anywhere, including, apparently, the kitchen counter with a drawing he was working on stuck to his face. 

Gerard groans, peeling the paper off of his face, and he frowns again when he sees that he drooled a little bit on the paper. That makes his preliminary sketch pretty much ruined, because the ink now looks blotchy from dribble.

Coffee addiction is a real thing, or so Gerard will enthuse to anyone unlucky enough to hear him start a rant about it. It’s real, it’s life ruining, and it’s very serious.

Gerard is incapable of functioning without coffee in his system. He cannot stay awake, be productive, or function at all whatsoever without coffee. But that codependency is a little unnerving and he is trying to break it. Tea just really isn’t the same though. It’s leafy, and it’s bitter, and there’s no purpose. Gerard wants coffee. That’s all he wants in life. Coffee and maybe a couple mints to get rid of his ever-present coffee breath. 

For the life of him, he doesn’t know why he’s trying to quit the coffee addiction, he just is. Maybe it’s because every second thought through his head is “oh I need coffee.” 

It’s not even like Gerard really _likes_ coffee. He doesn’t actually care about it individually, but his brain is so wrapped around the concept of drinking coffee four to five times a day, that it cannot fathom being without it.

Gerard would have thought it improbable to experience withdrawal symptoms from a coffee addiction, but the panging headache in his temple would beg to differ. This is all a really dumb idea. Tea just isn’t the same. He should stop this whole idea before he gets too far and can’t turn back.

He doesn’t do this though, and instead, stands up and walks over to the stove to take the boiling water off the burner. It doesn’t stop screaming at him until he removes it from the heat, and then he hears a ringing in his ears taking over the absence of the sound before it.

Gerard bangs at his head a moment, regretting that decision almost instantly, and then resumes his task of trying to get the water from the pot into a cup. This seems entirely too difficult. Nevertheless, Gerard walks over to the other side of the kitchen, grabs a mug from the cupboard above the sink, and walks back. He pours an amount of liquid that he would if this were coffee, and, really, he’s not entirely positive why he didn’t just microwave the damn water. That’s all he’s really trying to do, warm it up some, but his mother gave him a tea kettle when he moved out of the house five years ago, and this is the very first time he has ever used it. There’s something more traditional about doing it this way. 

Gerard then grabs the plastic grocery bag on the counter because he still hasn’t put the groceries away from yesterday, and he grabs the box of earl grey. He takes a tea bag from the box, looks at it disdainfully and then leaves it in the mug of hot water.

Gerard then turns around and tries to remember what he was about to do. He looks around, unsure of his next steps, and then remembers Seymour.

Gerard never in his life thought he would be a clingy parent, and he never in his life thought he would be the weird guy who talks to plants, but now he is both. Seymour is a special plant, and Gerard is his parent. Seymour does nothing. He sits in the front room window looking outside at the street directly outside, and he sits, and he waits, and he does literally nothing at all. Sometimes Gerard thinks that he might dance around and do head stands when Gerard turns his back, but no, all Seymour does is sit still and look out of place in the home of a man who draws cartoons for a living. He’s just a four year old Chinese evergreen who does literally fucking nothing because he’s a plant.

“How’s it going, Seymour?” Gerard asks when he looks at the plant. It says nothing, because, and this cannot be emphasized enough, it is a fucking plant.

“Are you even aware of your own existence?” Gerard asks him. “Like, do you ever have the crippling fear that you exist and then fall into an existential panic that you’re alive? No, probably not. All you do is photosynthesize because you are a fucking plant,” Gerard says, walking over to him and watering him as normal. He’s a very unappreciative houseguest when it comes down to it. He never thanks Gerard for keeping him alive, and he never acknowledges that he gets the best seat there is, right next to the window. It’s quite rude, actually. But Seymour is a fucking plant.

Gerard looks at him for a few seconds more, before turning back on his heels and he walks to go retrieve his lonely little cup of tea. He takes the teabag out, not knowing how strong he really wants it, as he’s never actually had earl grey tea before, and does not know what it’s even remotely like. The internet said it had caffeine, so this is the only thing that he could think of that may successfully keep him awake.

Gerard’s life is uninteresting at best. Since moving out, he’s had very little success in really becoming anyone. He has successfully bought a house, and that is probably his biggest accomplishment. It’s an almost hour train ride from where he works however, which is not as big an accomplishment. Gerard is accustomed to a certain way of living, and an apartment would not fill that criteria, so, he settles with the long commute as long as he gets to listen to music extremely loudly and air guitar with Jimi Hendrix.

The best thing that can be said of his job is that he at least, does not have to come into work every day, because much of the work he needs to do can easily be done at home. Another good thing that should be stated is that he also has a salary that’s nothing to complain about. He still hates it though. Gerard had thought that maybe when he signed on for this job, he would have an actual impact in the world of animation, but no. Instead, he’s the guy who draws the most basic of action shots for TV shows about nonsensical characters that have included talking staplers, an armadillo with a severe bout of manic depression, and of course, the ever popular, faceless cereal box which required no skill whatsoever to draw, but an unbelievable amount of stress to try to give emotion. How do you give a cereal box emotion when it has no face, arms, legs, or voice, and all it does is hop around? The answer is that you cannot do this at all, and the two months you spent storyboarding it all go to waste when the project is scrapped.

Gerard could be called somewhat pessimistic. He could also be called a very bad optimist. Either would be true, because he’s sort of on the middle ground of the two. While he is the kind of person who’s constantly hoping it’s going to rain buckets, he still considers the glass to be half full, because there’s way too much damn liquid there and he doesn’t want to be the guy who has to pee four hundred times a day.

Gerard grabs his mug, looks down at the murky liquid reluctantly, and takes a sip. His first response is that this shit is disgusting. His second response is that it tastes like tree bark and a ground up flower, which makes him think about Seymour and this feels like cannibalism before he realizes that he’s a human.

“Seymour, I think I just drank your cousin,” Gerard says, looking over the breakfast bar at his plant. Seymour says nothing in response, doesn’t even scoff by telling Gerard that they’re of a different genus of plants, he just sits there as always. 

“I’m sorry if that offends you,” Gerard shrugs, taking another sip of the tea, and then cringing because he’d forgotten momentarily what it tasted like. He’s not sure if this is really worth it. He’s just not a tea person, but he’s so unbelievably codependent on coffee that it’s almost like they’re in a relationship.

“See, this is why I wish we could switch places sometimes, man. All you have to do is sit there and look nice, while I’ve got to put up with drinking this teenage hipster shit,” Gerard says, staring at the window. There’s a vent behind the couch which is almost up against the wall where the window is, and the ledge is just big enough to house the pot where Seymour lives. What this means is that sometimes the air coming from the vent makes it look like he’s waving or nodding, and that’s probably why Gerard doesn’t feel as insane as he should when he talks to him. And he does talk to the plant too much, he knows that, but he doesn’t get out enough. 

Gerard is bad at maintain friendships. He’s bad at maintaining things altogether. The only thing he’s done a good job at taking care of is his plant, and that’s because he considers Seymour to be a close personal friend. He has regularly used the excuse “I’m hanging out with my friend Seymour” so as not to have to interact with other human beings. His brother claims that this is socially depraving, and it’s probably incredibly unhealthy, and Gerard very much agrees, but he does not care. He’s just afraid of being caught in the middle of social situations. 

He’s very bad at making friends as well, mostly in part because he’s incredibly shy, but the other part is because people can tell there’s something off about him. This isn’t actually true though, because there’s several things off about him, and there’s nothing that’s all that easy to focus on. 

For one, Gerard regularly talks to a plant. For another, he collects toy laser guns and has them on display in the spare bedroom upstairs which he uses as an office. Another odd thing is that he took a pole dancing class last year, just out of curiosity, before he found out that he’s not nearly talented enough. Quite possibly his strangest trait is his obsession with origami. He thought that making balloon animals might be similar to origami until he actually attempted that, and ended up screaming so loud after balloons would pop in his hands that the police were called to investigate if someone was being tortured.

Gerard pinches his nose and takes a long swig of the tea, burning his mouth considerably as he does so, and screwing up his sinuses for a few seconds at the strength of the herbs in there.

“Whoa, now there’s a kicker,” Gerard says, mostly to himself, as he looks around and shakes his head to alleviate the watering in his eyes.

Gerard hums to himself as he returns to the kitchen, dumps out the remainder of the tea, and puts the mug on top of the gigantic stack of dishes that need to be washed. He’ll take care of them eventually if someone holds a gun to his head and tells him to do the dishes, but if not for that, he probably won’t. Gerard is not a clean person. Cleanliness is overrated. As long as you know where everything is within a small scope of options, then everything is okay.

He walks over to the door, throws on his coat, and grabs his wallet which is where he last left it on the end table he bought on the side of the road a year ago. He probably should not make a habit of buying furniture off of mysterious venders in front of their garages, but it was only six bucks.

His favorite thing about living alone, Gerard has found, is that you never have to worry about people judging you if you start to sing spontaneously, and very much out of key. This is good, as Gerard is almost continuously singing whatever song pops into his head at any given moment.

As he pulls on his shoes, Gerard finds himself singing, “All the lonely people, where do they all belong?” He blinks a few times, frowns, and looks over at Seymour. “Do you know any songs more depressing than that one about the lonely people? Don’t even remember the fucking name.”

Seymour doesn’t respond, just blows lightly as a current of air hits it from just below, and Gerard takes that as a yes.

“See you after work, man,” he says, opening the door as his memory of the words gives him the only other bit of lyric he remembers, which he sings much too loudly. But that’s what’s so great about living alone, which then gives him a shuddering feeling because that must be where the lonely people belong. Alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments still mean a lot at this point, so please consider it.


	3. Dust to Dust: Frank

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pete’s got a crush.

“Frank are you still here?” Pete shouts from his room, but Frank doesn’t hear, because he’s in the middle of falling asleep while also accidentally listening to music so, he’s completely unaware of the fact that he’s actually listening to the Circle of Life.

“Frank?” Pete hollers again, louder this time. He opens the door to find Frank with his head lolling off his shoulder with one ear bud falling out and the other fallen down into his shirt. Pete rolls his eyes, and says sarcastically, “Wow, now that is attractive.”

He walks over to Frank, and grabs the iPod carefully from where it sits on the couch. He scrolls through the songs, looking for the loudest possible one he can find. He settles on the first song that he can find by Metallica and turns the volume as loud as it will go. 

“Ow, fuck, what?” Frank says, jumping awake like he was just electrocuted. He rips the ear bud away from him and looks around to find Pete smirking strongly. 

“Morning sunshine,” Pete says.

“Was that really necessary?” Frank asks.

“Yes, it was completely necessary,” Pete nods. “You doin’ anything?”

“What? No, why?” 

“Then you’re coming with me,” Pete says, grabbing Frank’s forearm, and very unsuccessfully trying to pick him up.

“What?” Frank asks, cringing at the way Pete’s nails accidentally dig into his arm as he tries to flail out of his grasp. He looks over at the clock on the stove to see that it’s one in the afternoon, and he has effectively done nothing at all whatsoever with his day so far. 

“Get up!” Pete groans when Frank does his best to anchor them both down, which makes Pete almost fall over the couch.

“I don’t wanna do anything, can I just stay here?”

“Nope,” Pete shakes his head.

“Why? Where are we going?” Frank asks, finally giving in when Pete starts poking him in the back of the neck. He stands up, straightens himself out a little bit, because his shirt is crooked on one side and his pants are falling down a little. 

“We’re going out the door,” Pete says.

“Very helpful, thank you,” Frank replies.

“Ugh, fine,” Pete groans, “gotta stop by ‘Trick’s and I need moral support.”

“Right, you need moral support to approach the guy you never actually dated and has no idea you’re in love with him, and you can’t find someone else to do it?”

“Who lives here rent free?’

“Who makes me pay for all the food?” Frank asks.

“Who’s going to become a few inches shorter than he is now if he doesn’t march along behind me?” Pete replies.

“That makes no sense? How on earth are you going to make me shorter? Are you just going to cut my feet off or something, because that’s really unoriginal, and you can do better?”

“Shut up, shorty,” Pete says, walking over to the door.

“I... we’re the same fucking height,” Frank groans back.

“I’m, like, at least half an inch taller.”

“You keep telling yourself that,” Frank says, shaking his head and groaning as he’s dragged out of the apartment. The hallway outside is vaguely creepy. Honestly it looks like the kind of hotel you’d expect to see in a horror movie. Their neighbor to the left is Jack Torrance and the guy on the right is Norman Bates. Why do so many horror movies take place in hotels anyway? Well, where there’s smoke there’s fire.

“What do you need anyway?” Frank asks, “Like why is it that you have to _see_ him?”

“I left something over there?”

“And what would that be? Aside from your dignity?” Frank asks.

“Well excuse you, I’ll kick you out of the apartment. I swear I will.”

“No you won’t.”

“Why do you doubt me so?” Pete questions.

“Because you’re too good a person, and that’s your ultimate weakness. You’re too nice.”

“Fuck,” Pete groans. “Am I really? Damn, you’re probably right. See, this is why I hate you.”

“Yeah, tell that to the guy who you need to help you out.”

“Alright sorry. I love you ever so much Frank, you’re the light of my life and I would very much like it if you were to help me out here, because you’re my favorite person ever and my life would be nothing without you. There. Better?”

“The sarcasm levels coming off of you right now could literally put a toddler in a coma,” Frank says.

“Well then it’s a good thing that there are no kids around,” Pete says. He rushes down the steps ahead of Frank, who is still astounded that Pete manages to walk faster than him even though they are literally the same height. Their legs are the same length, how on earth is it possible for Pete to always walk quicker than him everywhere? He doesn’t even seem to try, and Frank doesn’t know why he’s so bothered by this, he just feels as though science has suspended reality whenever it comes to Pete. 

Like he has an out of this world ability to slip on everything. Literally, the man could trip if his feet were glued to the ground. He’s fallen down so many flights of stairs while Frank’s known him that he stopped tallying it up after the seventh time. This is probably a good explanation for why he is the way he is though, because everything he says is nonsensical at best. He was probably dropped on his head as a child, down an elevator shaft, and across two lanes of traffic. 

“You never said what it was that you left there.”

“I, uh,” Pete says sounding uncertain. “I’m not sure.”

“You’re what?”

“Well... like, I don’t remember?”

Frank shakes his head, “you didn’t leave anything over there at all did you? You just can’t get over the fact that you’re bad at flirting.”

“I’m not bad at flirting, Patrick is just extremely bad at understanding when someone is trying to flirt with him. He’s bad at picking that up. Bad reception or something. Like Verizon.”

“Mhm, sure,” Frank says, rolling his eyes. Pete opens the door out of the building, and he doesn’t hold it open like he usually does, and this is mainly because he wants to hit Frank in the face with a door. Frank stops it before his front tooth is broken, but he grumbles a suggestive couple of words in Pete’s direction. He doesn’t seem to hear, and if he does, he doesn’t care. Pete’s too busy in his thoughts thinking about the guy who Frank has decided he’s in love with.

It’s not that he is in love with Patrick or anything, he just likes every little thing about him, and every thought through his head is a constant chorus of “what would Patrick think about that?” It’s pretty ridiculous because he literally has known the guy for less than a month, but Pete tends to fall hard and very quickly, and then go through a period of complete and utter misery as he realizes what he’s gotten himself caught up in. 

Pete has never rightly given himself a label. He’s ambiguous at best, and that’s okay, because that’s just who he is. He is a rebel first and foremost in his spare time, and the last thing he wants is to ever have someone pinning him down with a word that he’s going to have to bear like an anchor. He doesn’t need that. He just goes with the flow and tries not to drown in the way he drools over half the people he meets.

Concerning Patrick though, Pete has been crazy about him since he first stepped into the record shop beneath the guy’s apartment. Pete has a knack for falling in love with strangers though. He’s almost constantly experiencing love at first sight, but Patrick is one of the first person he’s ever pursued past that first initial glance or two. Frank thinks he’s crazy. Pete says he’s fanatic. Patrick is clueless as fuck.

The fact of the matter is that, for the last three weeks, Pete’s been cozying it up with the guy, and Frank has been dragged along the whole time because Pete always needs ‘moral support.’ Really, he’s like a kid going to the doctor’s office. He’s just completely terrified. What’s worse is that Pete tries to act cool so he can’t hang out with Patrick too much or he seems clingy, so he has to come up with these ridiculous excuses which Frank is always dragged into like a dog on a leash. 

Honestly, Frank’s kind of jealous that Pete is capable of actually trying to find someone, because Frank is way shyer than he ever hoped to be. When he was really little, he was afraid of just about everyone except, for some reason, his elderly neighbor. Then he got a little older and there was a grace period when he was a preteen where he got over that anxiety the slightest bit, but by the time he’d started high school he was once again afraid of everyone that breathed a little too close to him. He has been ever since. The only people he doesn’t get bothered by are people he’s spent a really insane amount of time with. Such as Pete, or his mother, and that’s about it. Frank doesn’t even talk much with his coworkers. 

“Would you stop fucking humming?” Pete shouts at him as he walks down the street. It’s more of a curse than a blessing that the record shop is close to their apartment because it means Frank is always being dragged to go see Patrick. It’s a recent thing, really, because they’d never seen Patrick there. It’s not like he works there, he just lives in the apartment above it.

Patrick must be as clueless as Pete is about romance though, because they keep ‘conveniently’ bumping into each other, or Pete will always find an excuse, such as this, to see him. It’s pretty obvious what he’s trying to do, but Patrick hasn’t picked up on anything, or if he has, he’s the best actor the world has ever seen. Then again, he really may be a fantastic actor, because he has just as many Oscars as Leonardo Dicaprio. 

“I’m sorry. How can you even hear me?” 

“Well you’re not exactly quiet are you?” Pete says, shaking his head, “what song is that anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Frank shrugs, “probably the last song I was listening to when you woke me up.”

“Circle of Life, huh?”

“What? No! I don’t have that on my phone,” Frank replies defensively. 

“Dude, we both know you have the Lion King soundtrack. Don’t try to deny it. I also know you were singing songs from Hairspray last week in the shower. You can’t hide from me.”

“I... well, let’s hear you explain the Cranberries CD.”

“Christmas present from my aunt,” Pete shrugs, “but it’s lovely to know that your masculinity clings on the thread of your music library. So I shan’t even bring up the Bee Gees.”

“You’re such a bitch. I can’t believe you’re trying to get me to help you by trying to insult me,” Frank shakes his head.

“Yeah,” Pete says, obviously not listening to Frank as he looks off like he’s trying to think of something. “Okay, so what sounds like a better thing to say I forgot, my chap stick or my phone?”

“You’re such an idiot,” Frank shakes his head, “Obviously not your phone, it’s been three days since you last saw him, so you’d have realized that your phone was gone way sooner, and gone to retrieve it. Chap stick is fucking stupid, how did you graduate college you complete dumbass? Do you have sunglasses with you?”

“Uh,” Pete checks the pockets in his sweatshirt, since it’s too cold out to go without, “Yeah. So sunglasses then?” 

“Yes, and when you go in there, say you left them somewhere in his place, and then miraculously find them when he turns his back,” Frank says.

Pete nods, and looks at him for a moment before looking back at the sidewalk in front of him. Due to the fact that it’s a weekday, not many people are on the street at this time, so it’s pretty much deserted aside from a few passing cars and the occasional pedestrian. 

“I think it’s the Misfits.”

“What?”

“That song you keep humming,” Pete replies. “It’s the Misfits.”

“Oh,” Frank says, before nodding, because Pete’s probably right. Frank’s the kind of person who’s almost incapable of remembering song names. He’s not sure what it is. He’s got a perfectly good memory when it comes to obscure Pokémon, but put him on the spot to name a song and he’s clueless. Frank once forgot the name of the National Anthem. He called it ‘America’s Theme Song.’

He sees the record shop come into his plane of sight, and he’s eagerly awaiting the time when he will be able to ditch Pete so that he can do his flirting in private. Frank does not want to pay witness to that. He just wants to go home and play Mario Kart with weird strangers. 

“Okay. God, I’m nervous.”

“Just ask him out. Tell him you enjoy looking at his face. Or tell him that you picture his face when you-”

“Okay, that’s enough. We need to get thicker walls,” Pete says.

“Yes, but unfortunately, we rent.”

“ _I_ rent,” Pete corrects, “you sleep on my couch.”

“I pay for your food.”

“We went over this like ten minutes ago.”

“You’re an asshole,” Frank says.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Aha, so you don’t deny it!”

“You’re as immature as you were in high school. You’re literally the same person as you were in high school. It’s been almost three years, evolve a little. Learn a new language, find a new hobby, and buy a different pair of shoes for god’s sake. You’re literally just an eighteen year old Frank with slightly larger bags under your eyes and now you know the difference between Vitamins A and D.”

“Dude, I don’t even think doctors know the difference.”

“You’ve had this job for seven months,” Pete says, as if it’s an insult.

“You’ve had that face for twenty five years and still have not mastered the art of not looking like you’ve got shit under your nose.”

“Bastard,” Pete groans.

“I never denied that,” Frank replies, and when Pete stops to stand in front of the building, Frank just looks at him and rolls his eyes. The record shop is to their left with the entrance to the apartments above it right in front of where they now stand. It’s an unassuming little building with a hair salon on the record shops right, and a small boutique on the other side. Frank thinks it’s nice, except for the alley around the corner which always smells like rotten fish for no good reason. “Well... you going to actually ring the bell?”

“I don’t know...” Pete says.

“We came all the way here,” Frank points out.

“We could go back.”

“Nope,” Frank says and he presses the buzzer for Pete, and then proceeds to run the fuck away.

“Why did you-” Pete starts but then notices Frank running and he shouts after him, “You fucking dick.”

“I love you too Pete, see you later!” Frank shouts back, anxious to get home so that he can make it in time to watch the beginning of Let’s Make a Deal. Who says adult life isn’t any fun? Probably someone very wise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm glad the reception of Seymour is so positive, I guess that means he's going to have to play a larger role than I'd intended.


	4. The Ever Cynical mikeyway: Gerard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I might as well retitle this fic “The Continuing Adventures of Seymour the Fucking Houseplant.”

“Hey little buddy,” Gerard says, walking through the door and throwing his coat randomly at the wall where someone bothered to add a couple coat hooks that have been underutilized. 

He likes to think that Seymour says something back in a vaguely German accent, even though that wouldn’t make sense. He’s a Chinese evergreen, you’d expect him to be Chinese, but Gerard has always gotten the German vibe off of him. Then again, Seymour is a fucking plant and has no accent at all.

Gerard thinks, if he were a real person, Seymour would be a German therapist with a love of fine brandy. He would insist on having leather furniture and probably smoke cigars. He’d be unmarried by choice, possibly asexual, with a profound interest in the building of the Panama Canal. Also, he would listen to Earth, Wind and Fire and smooth jazz.

Gerard walks over to the kitchen and he starts to make himself some coffee before he has the realization that he’s not drinking coffee anymore, and his heart sinks a little at the very idea of it. 

“Oh fuck, I hate this,” Gerard frowns, looking around sadly at his small little house. He peers through his cabinets, trying to think of something he can make that would mimic the taste of coffee but isn’t coffee, but then he realizes, that’d be cheating. This is the dumbest resolution he’s ever made with himself, and New Year’s is still nearly nine months away.

Gerard doesn’t know what to do now, so he just walks over to the steps which are on the back wall against the kitchen, where he makes his way upstairs slowly so that he can take this awful tie off. Gerard hates ties. He hates things that go around his neck in general really, but a tie makes him feel too old, and he still likes to pretend he’s only twelve years old. Or at least, if you were to look through his Netflix account, he’d kid you into thinking that. It’s not Gerard’s fault that a large majority of animated Disney movies are listed. It’s also a complete accident that he’s watched Atlantis the Lost Empire seven times. Seymour really likes that movie. Seymour also really likes Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone because there are plants who try to kill people. 

Gerard throws off his tie into the corner of his bedroom, the corner meant specifically for clothes throwing, not the other corner, that’s specifically for socks and only socks. He makes his way back down a few minutes later after changing into the proper Friday night attire which is his old Green Lantern shirt and sweatpants that haven’t been washed in a while, but he never leaves the house wearing these so they don’t need to be washed as often. 

Gerard walks down the stairs, catching a glimpse of his neighbor’s kid chasing a dog down the road on a skateboard. The dogs not on the skateboard, the kid is, but Gerard now wishes that it was the other way around.

He finally pulls himself over the couch and collapses with his head on the armrest where he wants to stay for the rest of the year, ideally, but will probably have to get up at some point which doesn’t sound fun. He searches around for the TV remote, finding it in between the cushions, and then tries to find something that isn’t going to rot away his brain.

From this spot, Seymour is just above him because the couch is nearly pressed up against the wall where Seymour’s windowsill is, and Gerard looks up at him after each channel to see if he’s got an opinion. Seymour seems to nod a little bit when Gerard lands on a channel playing The Golden Girls, but Gerard democratically decides against it. The only channel that he has to pass by quickly is the HGTV channel, because, even though you’d think Seymour would like that channel, given that the G stands for garden, Gerard is often worried that he’ll get offended by remodeling shows where they pull out plants to make their yards look nicer. Really, Gerard worries too much about a thing that literally has no opinion at all whatsoever, but if you try to tell him that Seymour has no opinions, he is ready to fight you. 

Gerard groans audibly five minutes later when someone knocks on the door and he’s trying to remember if he ordered anything in the mail when the door opens by itself. Gerard never has visitors, this is mainly because he doesn’t like to hang out with people all that much, and would really prefer eternal solitude. Instead of the most polite burglar ever however, the door opens to reveal Mikey standing there looking at him like he’s looking at a piece of gum on the sidewalk.

“I gave you that key for emergencies,” Gerard says with annoyance.

“This was an emergency, I didn’t want to wait for you to answer the door.”

“But still, you don’t just walk into other people’s houses,” Gerard replies, looking at Mikey upside down because this way he doesn’t have to twist his head around to look at him, he can just bend it over the armrest. 

“I just like making a habit of proving that I’m not a vampire,” Mikey says walking in, and throwing the door shut ungracefully behind him. 

“How would that prove you’re not a vampire?” 

“Uh, duh,” Mikey says, looking at him like he’s an idiot, “Vampires have to be invited in. Jeez man, catch up on your Whedon.”

“I don’t think he’s the guy who invented that idea,” Gerard responds.

“Well, no, but he’s one of the only modern writers that I’m aware of who endorses that fact.”

“Fact? Is it really a fact? I mean, vampires are fictional creatures Mikes, do they really have any specific set of guidelines for ever form of mythology, because I think it’s all a matter of interpretation. I see no reason for why Lestat should properly need to be afraid of garlic any more or less than Count Dracula.”

“Okay, how about we set aside the conventions of vampirism for the moment and focus on something of higher importance.”

“Zombies?” Gerard asks, “because I’ve got notes on them too. I’ve got an arsenal of info on zombies actually, like Walking Dead, or Night of the Living Dead, or Shaun of the Dead, or even one of those vanilla zombie movies that people make now like that one with Brad Pitt.”

“Yeah,” Mikey says sardonically, “Zombies are much more important, what ever was I thinking?” He walks over to the kitchen so that Gerard can’t see him roll his eyes.

“Why are you here anyway?” Gerard calls over to him turning to look at the TV again.

“Dude, seriously? We made plans like two weeks ago, I said I was coming over.”

“What?” Gerard asks, not paying attention as the screen distracts him.

“We made plans weeks ago!” Mikey repeats.

“Seymour, correct me if I’m wrong, but Mikey’s completely making that up to see if it’ll make me feel guilty, but it won’t in fact do any such thing, because you and I both know, Michael, dear sweet Michael James Way, is lying out his ass.”

“Alright, you caught me. I didn’t know you had that good a memory. I just wanted to make sure you didn’t spend another Friday night watching reality shows with a plant. And dude, might I also add, why the fuck are you watching the Lindsay Lohan remake of Freaky Friday?” he asks.

“I’m not... I was just channel surfing,” Gerard says, changing the channel swiftly so that he’s now watching some boring Sitcom about some vagrantly sexist father figure making jokes about marriage being the same as death. That narrows it down to about seventy percent of currently airing TV shows.

“Yeah, mhm, sure,” Mikey says, grabbing a bag of potato chips and sticking his hand in them, which is a little rude considering that those are not his, and he really should’ve asked first, but Mikey is a very expecting sort of guy who usually doesn’t ask permission of things. He’s not a beg for forgiveness kind of guy either, because he’s smarter than everyone else, and never actually admits to being wrong, but it’s not in a narcissistic way, it’s in a you-could-only-understand-it-if-you’ve-actually-met-Mikey-Way way. 

“Well, now that you’ve barged in unannounced and unwelcomed, what do you want to do? I don’t want to get up. I’ve already assumed the couch potato position, you’re eating my potato chips, and Seymour is closely related to the potato, so we’re all covered on the spud front.”

“Gerard, that thing is not related to a potato,” Mikey says.

“Yes he is, and don’t call him a ‘thing,’ it’s not very polite.”

“It’s a plant.”

“ _He’s_ a plant,” Gerard corrects.

“It’s not a he, Gerard, it’s a plant. It doesn’t have a sex.”

“Uh, excuse you, he’s a plant, he’s both sexes at the same time, everyone knows that. Seymour is both sexes, but he prefers male pronouns, and I wish to respect his life choices,” Gerard says, so seriously that Mikey is uncertain of whether or not he’s actually sticking up for the sexual identity of a plant.

Mikey opens his mouth a few times, trying to find the right words, because he doesn’t know how not to make Gerard angry, because he knows that Gerard will adamantly defend that plant to the ends of this earth and beyond. “It’s... not even alive, assigning a gender to it makes about as much as me calling my shoelace Stephanie.” 

“He is alive! Are you kidding, he’s a plant, of course he’s alive. Plants are living things, you dumbass, otherwise they wouldn’t grow or need oxygen and shit like that. And for your information, he’s a very healthy plant too. I take good care of him, water him daily, make sure he sits in the sun, read him poetry, and give him the proper pesticides. He’s perfectly alive and very well, I might point out.”

Mikey decides not to address the poetry thing even though he’s now insanely curious as to whether Gerard reads him something like Shel Silverstein or more along the lines of T.S. Eliot, and then he has a weird image of Gerard reading The Raven to Seymour and he has to set that thought aside for the sake of his sanity.

Mikey nods, and says, “Okay, fine, sure, it’s alive. But it’s not actually _alive_ alive, is it? It’s a plant. It doesn’t have feelings, or emotions or anything.”

“Can you be sure of that?” Gerard asks.

“What?” 

“Can you be sure! Mikey, we’ve never communicated with plants directly, but maybe that’s because they don’t speak English. Maybe they talk to each other telepathically. There’s no way for us to prove that they don’t have big long conversations about us, but because of the fact that they can’t move, they’re a much more civil species than us, because seriously, we’re always fucking shit up. I bet plants take notice of it too. They probably talk so much shit about us humans, and I don’t even blame them. Humans are dumb. We’re stupid, I hate us.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Well, listen man, plants have never outlawed specific humans, and yet we do that to plants. Plants have never fought wars over dumbass things. Plants are so much smarter and more highly evolved than we are, and yet we think we’re smarter just because we can walk around, yet I bet you that, if he could move, Seymour would be a fucking boss at solving Sudoku puzzles.”

“I... you’re defending the integrity of a plant, Gerard. A plant. A motherfucking plant.”

“Yeah, and another thing, plants never fuck mothers, many of them are even asexual, _and_ they even help out their surroundings, unlike humans. What do we do? We liter, we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we contaminate water, and kill other animals, sometimes for sport. Plants are perfectly innocent though. Some plants provide pollen, and some provide oxygen and shit, or whatever. This is, like, eighth grade science, bro, you should already know this, but if not, get this down because it is test-taking gold.”

“Your best friend is a fucking plant,” Mikey says, emphatically throwing his hands up in the air, as if in defeat. “A fucking plant. A plant. You’re basically dating a plant.” 

“I’m not, I’m in a relationship with myself at the moment.”

“Which is basically like saying you’re dating a plant,” Mikey replies.

“Nope. I’m spending time with myself so that I can hopefully get over my crippling self-confidence issues and all-encompassing fear of dying unloved. Besides, this way, my date and I never fight over the remote.”

“That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard you say in my entire fucking life. You need a boyfriend. Or a cat. Or several cats. Or a boyfriend _and_ a cat.”

“I need a lifetime supply of pizza and an Etch A Sketch,” Gerard replies, “oh, and maybe a plant voice translator so I can find out what Seymour is thinking. I really want to know what he thinks of me, but he probably just thinks I’m a fucking idiot. That’s fair though. It’s not unwarranted.”

“It’s a plant!”

“ _He’s_ a plant!” Gerard repeats. “Do not demean him, or I will throw this month old bag of corn flakes I bought when I meant to buy a box of frosted flakes but misread the label, that I, for some reason, keep underneath the couch.”

“That’s the weirdest threat I’ve heard all day, and to make it worse, you’re defending a plant.”

“Don’t listen to him Seymour, you are worth defending. I totally agree with you mate, human wars are stupid, but I would gladly build a giant horse statue for you.”

Mikey makes a strangled sound, kind of like a goose, but also kind of like a somewhat constipated donkey, and this summarizes his opinion of Gerard’s infatuation with a plant pretty sufficiently. In other words, Mikey’s pretty sure that Gerard’s receded into a full-on hermit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a reminder to all of you, even though it's technically not a reminder because many of you do not know this, the new Plain White T's album comes out tomorrow/today (March 31) and even though I have not heard it yet, I bet you it's going to be fantastic, so you should consider purchasing it, because you will receive my endless love.


	5. Home Is Where the Heart Is: Frank

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I feel like summaries are just an excuse to somewhat spoil the chapter you’re about to read, so I’m not going to do it this once.

There is a certain eeriness to their building. Frank’s never been a huge fan of it. Pete only lives in this apartment because it’s an affordable price, and Frank only stays with him because he doesn’t have any more money than Pete does, and he also has nowhere else to stay. 

He is not going back to his mother’s house. That would be demeaning. He couldn’t fathom ever having to go back there, because, to put it simply, he would rather fail on his own than succeed under that roof. It’s a very stifling place to live, as are most places, but extra so in his childhood home. 

It’s not even because his mother is strict, though that does play a hand in it surely, it’s mostly because that house is where most of his dreams turned to dust in the first place. That’s where Frank’s love of everything was quashed before he ever had a chance to see it really fully bloom. 

Frank was going to be a guitarist in a punk band. He was going to be Prince, except a little taller. He was going to be George Harrison, except a little shorter. He was going to be Slash but not so creepy and with a lot less hair. Maybe Frank Zappa except without the pervy moustache. Frank just really wanted to be a famous guitarist, that’s all.

He walks along the sidewalk, back to their building, mindlessly humming some song that’s been stuck in his head that he’d really rather not know at all. He’s pretty sure it’s by Michael Bublé which is the first reason why he wishes he doesn’t know it. Secondly, Frank doesn’t know what the hell it is, but there’s something really fucking charming about Michael Bublé. He’s the kind of guy you’d take home to your mom and be proud of, but your mom would eventually like him better than you, and Frank doesn’t know what it is about him that makes that so true, it just is. The song he’s humming is the only song that anyone actually knows by Bublé which is Haven't Met You Yet, and there’s definitely some irony there that he just isn’t sensing. 

Frank’s mind is occupied with that and his curiosity as to what’s happening with Pete right now. Due to his incredible awkwardness, he would be very surprised if Patrick’s caught on to a fucking thing yet, but Pete’s probably over there making an idiot of himself. He might be trying to impress Patrick with that thoroughly unimpressive story about how Pete won a trophy for consuming the most amount of Oreos in under a minute at a fair. Frank keeps trying to tell him that there is nothing even the slightest bit sexy or alluring about that, but Pete insists that Frank just doesn’t get it. Maybe Frank doesn’t but the most likely option is that Pete is really really bad at flirting.

Frank hurries through the door to the building, the cold more evident as the wind hits his face, and he slouches his shoulders when he steps into the very unexciting entrance to the apartment building. He makes his way towards the steps, takes them two at a time, and very nearly trips on a couple steps. 

Frank arrives on the landing where Pete’s apartment is and he’s making his way down the hall when he notices something’s wrong. 

He looks up from where his eyes were focused on his feet and that’s when he notices that their door is ajar. Frank, knowing that they’ve only been gone for about twenty minutes, just assumes that one of them must have accidentally left the door open. He knows that nothing could have possibly happened in that short a time span, or at least, he doesn’t _think_ something could have happened.

But then Frank steps a little closer and it’s like someone’s shot him in the forehead with the realization that strikes him in a matter of seconds.

Frank gets ever nearer to the door, even though time has literally come to stand still. Frank’s positive that the earth has slowed down, because there is no way that any of this is happening in real time. There’s no way his footsteps can actually be that loud, and there’s no way he can actually be hearing his own heart beat like it’s a huge clock tower chiming from outside the building. There’s no way any of this is real, because time does not work like this, he’s sure of it.

It’s when Frank is actually standing in the frame of the door when he realizes the entirety of this situation. The door’s been kicked in. Frank evaluates the lock, too nervous to turn and look inside the rest of the apartment, too terrified to even begin to think about it. The lock is broken, Frank’s sure of that. It’s hanging off its hinges like a gaping wound in the door. It looks like someone kicked at it, which, in all likelihood, is precisely what happened.

Frank then looks past the lock into the apartment, feeling his heart either stop, or beat as fast as the speed of light. He’s not sure which. It seems like both and neither at the same time. Either way, a medical professional would be severely confused.

Maybe it’s an illusion, or maybe Frank is completely correct, but it feels like its several degrees colder in the apartment than it is in the hall. It feels like Antarctica. It’s far too cold for it to be at this time of the year. Also, it’s much darker than Frank can imagine it to be when he realizes that the lights are on. The main light, the one that hangs in the dank little living room, is on, and it’s illuminating most of the front room, which includes the kitchen and the hall that’s barely even classifiable as a hall, leading down to the bathroom.

For a moment, the too-small apartment seems like the biggest place in the world. It seems like the Roman Colosseum, vast and wonderful. It seems like the best home in the world, the only one Frank’s ever lived in and ever loved. It feels like everything, and that’s because it _is_ everything. It’s not the grandest place in the world, but this is still his home. 

Frank’s breathing is out of control now. He can’t find his breath. He feels like a three hundred year old asthmatic smoker being choked to death. He can’t fill his lungs. It’s as if someone took a vacuum cleaner and sucked up all the air in the room, leaving Frank purple in the face and dying. 

Then, it’s as if the time that had all slowed down is put into fast forward. First, Frank’s slamming the broken door shut behind him, wedging a chair underneath it so that it’s a semblance of closed, and then he’s throwing things everywhere, trying to figure out what’s gone. Obviously the first thing he notices is gone is the Wii. That’s livable, not ideal, but at least he doesn’t need it to live. Secondly, their TV is still there, not surprising, it’d be a hell of a burglar who knows how to steal a TV in under fifteen minutes with that much precision.

Frank’s biggest fear is proved correctly though when he looks literally everywhere, the coffee table, the couch, underneath every item of furniture, even the dishwasher, and that’s when he realizes his laptop is gone. Frank quickly walks over to Pete’s room, makes quick effort of searching everywhere that Pete would likely keep his own laptop, and that’s when he comes up empty for both of their computers. Their laptops are gone.

Frank sort of just collapses on the floor of Pete’s room, his head in his hands, not even bothering to try to remember that he’s a twenty year old man who’s not supposed to cry. Sometimes though, he just doesn’t fucking care. This is one of those times. 

He can’t even begin to describe what he’s feeling. Stupidity. Humility. Desperation. Petrification. Most of all, a freezing cold, incomprehensible, all-consuming sensation of pure dread.

Frank feels like someone’s just diagnosed him with a terminal illness. He can’t even begin to describe it. It kills him, it’s not even believable.

Everything important to him in the world was on that computer. Everything he needed. Every tiny little thing that Frank depended on is gone. 

Fuck, Frank thinks, literally everything he knew was in the hard drive of that stupid fucking laptop. He actually has a document with all of his passwords on it because he’s bad at remembering them. And it’s gone. All of it. Nearly four years of building up his entire life around that tiny little thing is just gone because some bastard decided to ruin his life.

Frank’s finding it impossible to come up with a single silver lining here. All he can focus on is this guttural horror. He doesn’t keep a surplus of money in the apartment, no money hidden in the sock drawer, but he’s not finding that to be much of a comfort. He had his phone on him when he left so he has that, but that doesn’t help him feel any better either. There’s just nothing. Nothing but grief and fear and loathing of whomever has done this.

It’s just that, no one ever expects to be the victim. No one ever thinks that they’re going to be the one who’s victimized by anything. As far as people are concerned, we’re all untouchable, invincible, impossible to hurt. No one would ever dream of robbing you, no one would ever dream of kidnapping, maiming, murdering, blackmailing, or anything else to you. No one would ever dream of messing with you.

That’s how it feels. That’s how people feel about the world. Frank never could have thought it possible to be the one who was hurt by something like this, because he never thought it possible that it would happen to _him_. 

This kind of thing happens to other people. Other people get robbed. Other people have their valuables stolen. Other people have their apartments burgled or their laptops taken, it doesn’t happen to you. It can’t have happened to him.

But it has. That fear is crippling to Frank and that’s one of the reasons why he feels like someone rerouted Niagara Falls to come out of his eyes.

Everything seems cold now. Everything seems fallible. It’s like someone flipped a switch in Frank’s mind, because, yesterday, this apartment felt safe. It’s not that it particularly is safe, but he felt immortal. Frank never thought about himself ever being hurt, because he’d never had to deal with it. Never had to even wonder what it was like to have someone tear your place apart, stealing everything of value. He never had to worry about it.

Now though, he looks around and everything seems spoiled. Everything about this apartment is scary. Frank could sleep on that couch outside of this door and he could feel untouchable, but now, he sits on the floor and he’s _afraid_. He’s afraid of what’s happened. He’s afraid of the fact that someone victimized this apartment, and it feels as though someone victimized him personally. It feels like someone took a knife and carved out scars all over his body. It feels like Frank was personally assaulted.

Sure this place isn’t the Buckingham Palace or anything of the sort, but as much as he’d try to deny it, its home. Frank lives here. He’s lived here for a good chunk of a year. This is where he comes home every night, takes a shower, and eats his dinner. This is it. This is where he lives.

Now there’s a big blemish on it. It’s not the fact that the door is broken in, it’s not the fact that their most important possessions are missing, it’s the fact that someone came in here unannounced, unwelcomed, and they took. They took, and they stole, and they left. Just like that. They stole everything that Frank is now finding it unfathomable to live without. Most importantly, they’ve now taken away Frank’s sense of security.

His built-in sense that everything will be okay, it’s gone. Now all he sees when he looks around him, looks around at Pete’s room, he sees spoiled items. He sees spoiled clothes, a spoiled mattress, spoiled floors, spoiled everything. Everything looks vile and putrid to him now, and that only makes him feel worse. 

Frank’s never played the victim. He’s used to playing the role of the broken, but never has this coincided with feeling like he’s been personally wronged. 

So Frank just sits there, his knees pressed against his chest, his heart beating at a sporadic rate, his eyes feeling heavy and stinging, and he feels the whole world crumble down into the bowels of the earth, leaving everything in black and white. He feels his entire worth fall down a drain, like his entire life is amounted simply in the place he lives, and it’s awful. They say that home is where the heart is, and Frank suddenly feels like that’s the truest thing to ever have been said. He’s hated this place for as long as he’s lived here, but it’s his home and it’s where he lives, and it’s now been tarnished. He doesn’t know how to handle this feeling. He hates it and he wants it to go away, but it’s not leaving him. 

Frank feels alone. He feels his age catching up to him, even though he’s not that old. He feels his body grow tired like an old man. Most of all, he feels scared and afraid of his own home. The one place, the one place in the world where he’s supposed to feel safe, it’s been taken away from him now. All he feels is horror at his own home, and that’s a feeling no one deserves. 

All Frank can think is that this could have happened to anyone else. It should’ve happened to anyone else. He doesn’t even care if he’s being selfish right now, he doesn’t care, this should have been anyone else in the entire world. It should’ve been their neighbors, or the people who live upstairs. It should have been some famous celebrity, or his weird aunt that lives in upstate New York. It should’ve been his future brother in law, or his boss. This should have been literally anyone but him and Pete. This is all just some big mistake, whoever did this, they meant to attack someone else’s home. 

Except they didn’t. They attacked Frank’s home. They annihilated his sense of comfort in his own home for a couple of bucks. Why’d it have to be Frank?

Frank wants to be mad at everyone and everything all at the same time. He wants to blame the world and everyone in it. He wants his stuff back. He wants to scrub this entire place down with soap to clean up any trace of whoever was in here. He wants to rewind time and stop this ever happening.

Honestly, he doesn’t even care so much about the stuff on his laptop right now. He just doesn’t. Sure it sucks, but that’s not what he hates most about this, because, really, what he wants most of all, he just wants to stop feeling so scummy and broken in his own home. He just wants that to go away. He wants that feeling of safety back. But it’s gone, and now he’s afraid it will never return to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment?


	6. Circular Onions: Gerard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Concerning flirting, serial killing, and emergency comic books.

“I think your problem is that you have no friends,” Mikey states.

“I think your problem is that you can’t accept that I don’t want friends.”

“Everyone wants friends.”

“I have friends,” Gerard points out.

“That plant does not count as a friend.”

“Yes he does, and even if you discount him, I have you.”

“I’m your brother,” Mikey replies.

“You can still be my friend.”

“Of course I can’t be, Gerard. We’re brothers, by definition, I’m supposed to hate the very ground you walk on. If you call that friendship than I really need to buy you a better dictionary,” Mikey says.

“Okay, but you’re still my friend, obviously. If you weren’t then why would you come visit me in the fortress of solitude? And by the way, no one buys dictionaries, Mikey, it’s 2015. That’s what the internet is for.”

“Whatever. Just stop calling your home the fortress of solitude, it makes you sound like a comic book nerd.”

“I am a comic book nerd, Mikes, or if you hadn’t noticed that why do you think there’s a stack of comics in that corner over there,” Gerard asks, pointing to the corner by the window, where there is in fact, a stack of comic books. Most of them are upstairs, but he keeps those there in case of emergencies. Gerard still isn’t sure what emergencies would erupt that would entail needing a comic book, but he likes to be prepared. He may never have been a boy scout, but he does enjoy The Lion King so being prepared is something he likes to be. 

“It would probably be much easier to find a boyfriend if you didn’t own more comics than you have brain cells.”

“If I were to date someone who didn’t want me to own a bunch of comic books, I wouldn’t be dating that someone in the first place, because they have to accept me for who I am, and who I am is a comic book nerd, horrible cooker, and father of a plant.”

“I can’t believe you call yourself a father of a plant, what happened to you that made you so weird?” Mikey asks.

“I set fires as a child.”

“Is that your way of saying that I should be thankful you’re only an anti-social plant worshipper rather than a serial killer?”

“Well think about it, which one would you rather I was?” Gerard questions.

“Well at least a serial killer probably has better social skills than you do,” Mikey slouches, pulling a face and looking around the room with contempt.

“That’s so mean, why are you so mean?”

“While you were setting fires I was ripping the heads off of action figures,” Mikey replies.

“Those were dolls, Mikes.”

“ _Action figures_.”

“What’s so shameful about playing with dolls? Dolls aren’t just for girls, Mikey, they’re for anyone who wants to play with dolls.”

“I’m not going to have this discussion with you,” Mikey shakes his head.

“When you think about it objectively, it’s almost a wonder that you and I didn’t become a serial killing duo. It’s not too late you know.”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to worry. Seymour would never look at me the same way if I were to murder people. And if there’s anyone whose opinions I care about, it’s Seymour’s.”

“You know if you were to say that out of context it might even be a good thing because you talk about that plant like he’s a real person, so it might sound like you’ve made a friend, but when you put it back into the context in which it was spoken, the hearts of a million people break because you care about the opinions of a fucking houseplant.”

“Well at least you’re finally acknowledging that he’s a he,” Gerard says.

“Okay, that’s it, you’re getting out of the house,” Mikey says demandingly, before he’s hopping up and trying to pull Gerard off the couch by the wrist.

“Ow, I’m not leaving,” Gerard groans.

“Yes you are!” 

“I’ve already put on the sweatpants, Mikey, it’s not happening!” he says, doing his best to resist, but Mikey’s now got both of his hands on one of Gerard’s wrists which makes him run the risk of completely breaking it or something more horrific.

“You can change your pants then!”

“I don’t wanna!”

“When was even the last time you got laid?”

“Senior year,” Gerard admits.

“Fuck, it’s been _two_ years?” 

“I never said senior year of college!”

“Oh my... fuck! _Six_ years?” Mikey exasperates.

“I don’t like one-night stands, but I’m bad at relationships,” Gerard says, finally being pulled to his feet, rather begrudgingly. 

“You really need to get laid,” Mikey states.

“I really need to stay home and watch the Friends marathon.”

“Gerard, you’re a fully grown adult who has not been laid since he was a teenager!” 

“And doesn’t want to be, because he would rather stay home with his plant!” Gerard replies, not even noticing that he just referred to himself in the third person.

“You’re going out and that’s that.”

Gerard sighs, long and breathily, “If I go, are onion rings on the table?”

“You’re saying you’ll leave the house as long as I buy you spherical onions?” 

“Well spherical would kind of imply that they’re spheres, so I think they’d actually be circular, because a spherical onion would just be a regular onion, but to answer your question, yes,” Gerard nods.

“I didn’t expect a lesson in geometry when I came over here. But fine, you can have onion rings if you go put on a different pair of pants and leave the house with me, as long as you promise to keep an open mind to flirting with people.”

“Okay,” Gerard says, “but I’m not going to be happy about it.”

“I wasn’t necessarily expecting you to,” Mikey says, “but the only way to trick you into having a good time is to get you out of the fucking house.”

“Not true. I would have a good time watching the unresolved sexual tension between Ross and Rachel for ten seasons,” Gerard replies, stomping his way up the stairs. That’s the only thing saving him from seeing how far Mikey’s eyes roll, which is nearly out of his entire head.

Twenty minutes later, Gerard’s doing his best to cover his face in the corner of the modestly sized bar, while Mikey starts talking about the fallibility of trickle-down economics, and he doesn’t know why on earth he got here. He’d rather be doing literally anything else. Pulling his eye lashes out one by one. Listening to the greatest hits of yodeling. Watch the movie version of Avatar the Last Airbender. Actually, maybe that one is too cruel even for how much he doesn’t want to be here.

“You haven’t even looked up, you’re literally hopeless,” Mikey groans.

“I don’t want to be here, I thought that was something that could be easily figured out.” 

“But you agreed to come, and be open to flirting,” Mikey says.

“There’s no gay people in here!”

“You haven’t even looked up once!”

“Well it’s not like we wear labels on our foreheads, is it?”

“I don’t know, straight men don’t typically wear ascots,” Mikey says.

“Okay, the guy from Scooby Doo wore an ascot,” Gerard says.

“He could still have been! Don’t be so narrow-minded.”

“I’m not related to you,” Gerard says, still hiding his face with both his hair and his hand. This is one of the many pluses to having longer hair, also, head banging. 

Gerard’s busy trying to make out what song is playing, and he’s sure he knows it but he can’t quite make out the words. He keeps looking around at the speakers to see which one is closest so that he can lean one way to make it more understandable. 

“Says the boy who talks to a plant.”

“Seymour is better than you, because he doesn’t talk back and he doesn’t have a stupid-ass face.”

“You know we do share the same genes and have very similar faces, right?” 

“Yeah, but on me it works,” Gerard says.

Mikey is rolling his eyes and looking around the room when he spots the most potentially gay looking guy in the joint whose pants are far too tight. That’s basically the only thing Mikey can focus on because, wow, those are some tight pants. How does one even achieve that level of tight pants without having the circulation to your legs cut off? How would you get those on? You’d probably have to be sewed into those pants.

Gerard finally decides that the song is Jukebox Hero, and then he feels his gut drop because he knows that’s going to get stuck in his head for the next week and a half. 

“Okay, so I think that guy is probably gay,” Mikey says pointing, and Gerard looks up timidly, not because he wants to, but to entertain Mikey.

“Fuck, do you think his ankles are purple in those pants?” 

“Probably,” Mikey nods.

“I’m not into that, I prefer people who don’t walk like their legs are made out of wood.”

“Are you into _anyone_?”

“I’m into that guy from The Smiths. You know which one.”

“Okay, so he’s like sixty.”

“Well in that case, I’m not into anyone,” Gerard says.

“Really? So you’re not even willing to try? Do you want to be single forever?”

“No, but I don’t want to have to communicate with people who try to talk to me back, because I am not good at the whole conversation thing and I use the word ‘whack’ too much.”

“And you’ve got a dumb face and a voice that screams ‘punch me.’”

“You’re supposed to be supportive,” Gerard groans.

“I’m supposed to make fun of you actually, that’s my role as your brother. If I’m not making fun of you than my goal in life is squashed.”

“Just order me onion rings and shut up.”

“You’re not getting onion rings until you flirt with at least one person.”

“One? That’s a lot of people to be turned down by,” Gerard groans. 

“I will throw Seymour out a window, don’t you test me.”

“Mikey, if you throw Seymour out a window I’ll tie you to a flagpole using your own intestines.”

“That’s a fairly gruesome picture,” Mikey frowns.

“That’s what I’ll do if you lay a finger on my plant.”

“Say it louder, Gerard, everyone in the bar needs to know you threatened the life of your brother in defense of a plant.”

“I think saying it louder would probably deter any potential flirting I’d have with anyone in here. The only person who would still be into that would be the cactus on that shelf over there, and I think that would be a rather prickly relationship.”

Mikey just stares at Gerard, unable to even comprehend what a weird person Gerard is, and how unfortunate it is to be related to him. 

“Just go talk to the guy with the tight pants,” Mikey shakes his head.

“Alright, but when he turns me down, I’m going to also make you order me ice cream.”

“So be it,” Mikey sighs. Mikey watches him scoot out of the seat, scowl at him, and then walk across the floor. It’s hard to imagine someone whose walk even makes them look awkward, but Gerard is on a different plane of existence to everyone else. He lives, breathes, eats, and drink awkward.

Mikey’s barely even gotten his phone out to waste time when Gerard’s sitting back down in the booth across from him.

“That’s probably the fastest I’ve ever seen anyone strike out.”

“I didn’t strike out, he gave me his number,” Gerard says, pouting. He knows Mikey has little faith in him when it comes to socializing, but still, he’s not _completely_ hopeless. Mostly hopeless, yes, but he’s got some integrity to maintain. 

“Really?” Mikey asks, “Prove it.”

Gerard shrugs, takes his phone from his pocket and takes a minute of scrolling before he shows the screen to Mikey, who’s sitting and waiting looking rather skeptical. Gerard would be offended if his skepticism weren’t totally justified. Gerard is bad with people. He’s bad at talking to strangers, bad at even talking to waiters. Gerard’s the kid who had his friends buy him things if they hung out, because he was afraid of the cashier, and the kid who was afraid of his teachers. 

To this day, he’s still the guy who looks at his feet when paying for things and gets a leaden feeling around his throat if he’s by himself in a crowded place. His tongue feels like chalk when trying to talk to people, and he really doesn’t know how to tell Mikey how uninhibitedly he’s mortified of people without him thinking that Gerard’s really sick. 

Gerard’s not an idiot, he knows that he probably is, but he likes to avoid his problems because then he doesn’t have to face them. He’d rather be eternally horrified of everyone around him then have to face the fact that it’s not normal and he should really see someone about it. Really though, the fact that he feels his bones turn to straw and his hands start sweating whenever he so much as makes eye contact with someone he doesn’t know is not a good thing in the slightest.

“Who names their kid Brendon?” Mikey asks, looking at the phone.

“Obviously that guy’s parents,” Gerard replies.

“How did you get that so quick, by the way?” Mikey asks.

“Well he said I was cute, and that he liked my hair, and I told him that his pants were really tight and he said that he lost a bet, and I told him that I didn’t believe him so he said that he actually got the wrong size at the store but he couldn’t return them ‘cause he lost the receipt and that made more sense, and then he gave me his number.”

“How the fuck did you manage to get a number by telling a guy his pants were too tight?”

“Apparently it was funny that I told him my straight brother couldn’t stop staring at his ass. He said you’re welcome by the way.”

“He...” Mikey starts, drifts off, scrunches his face, and finally kicks Gerard’s leg under the table. “Why the fuck would you tell him that? But can you even blame me? Those are some fucking tight pants.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to stare at his ass,” Gerard replies.

“You’re a little shit.”

“Thanks,” Gerard nods.

“Well I mean it. It comes from the heart.”

“I think it comes from a little lower than that.”

Mikey frowns and says, “It comes from the liver.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever, now pay up bro. You owe me circular onions.”

Mikey sighs but he does nod, and that’s good news to Gerard. He grins at Mikey and then frowns when he realizes that he was right. He’s totally going to have Jukebox Hero stuck in his head for like three weeks. It’s also a good thing that Mikey hasn’t asked Gerard when he plans on calling ‘Brendon,’ because the answer would be never. He said he’d flirt, he never said he’d do anything more than that. And besides what else does a man need beside a killer knowledge of Norwegian folklore, a houseplant named Seymour, and a replica of the Millennium Falcon that he paid way too much for? He doesn’t need a boyfriend, even if he kind of wants one, because he really just wants to cuddle for god’s sake. And maybe be fucked against a wall. Life could be worse though, at least he doesn’t own any crocs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No but seriously I was in a battery store and they played Jukebox Hero and it's been three fucking days and it's still in my head. I can't get rid of it. Also you might want to consider commenting.


	7. Everything is Tainted: Frank

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Patrick is an angel.

Pete receives a phone call right in the middle of his unsuccessful wooing tactic which entails getting way too close to Patrick and talking about jellyfish. His first instinct is to reject the call, but Patrick is looking at him expectantly so he decides he’d better answer it now to get it to shut up. Besides, he wouldn’t want Patrick thinking that he’s a bad friend.

“Yes, Frank, what do you want?” Pete asks when he answers the phone. He’s met with some heavy breathing on the other end like Frank just ran a marathon and decided to call him to celebrate. Then he hears this horrible choking sound and he realizes that Frank is crying. “Whoa, Frank, what’s wrong?”

Frank’s voice comes out short and breathy when he responds, “I don’t know what happened! I just, I got home, and, like, the door was broken, and everything’s gone, Pete.”

“Slow down,” Pete says, feeling anxious at Frank’s words.

“It’s gone, Pete! Like everything. All the important stuff. They took our laptops, and, like, I just...”

“Someone broke in?” Pete asks, and Patrick looks over at him, surprised at those words.

“Yes! Someone broke in, and they fucked up the lock and they took, like, all of our shit.”

“Oh god, shit,” Pete says, jumping up from his seat, and barely even rushing in a goodbye before he’s running out of Patrick’s door.

“And I’m pretty sure they took like our entire medicine cabinet?” Frank says, “Like I don’t know what kind of a high they think they’re going to get from Lactaid, but it’s gone and so is everything else.”

“D’you call the police?” Pete asks, speeding his way down the sidewalk.

“Not yet, what’re they gonna do, they don’t give a shit?” Frank replies.

Pete’s not even really aware of the fact that Patrick is following behind him. He’s aware barely but it’s not registering, he’s far too panicked to consider him right now when all he can think about is the fact that Frank is freaking out and _he’s_ freaking out too, but Frank sounds like he’s having a heart attack mostly and that’s what’s worrying him the most.

“Well like, laptops have tracking devices or some shit don’t they?” Pete asks.

“I don’t fucking know, I’m not a rocket scientist, I’m just... Pete get here quickly,” Frank says.

“I am literally walking as fast as I can while also talking.”

“Then stop talking, and run faster,” Frank says, and the line ends at that.

“Someone robbed you?” Patrick asks Pete, catching up to him, though Pete now realizes that he’s never been to their apartment before. Also, he doesn’t know exactly why Patrick is following him, or why he cares, because Pete’s literally just the weird guy who’s been stalking him for the last few weeks.

“Evidently,” Pete says, hurrying along, not really worrying about the fact that the street is starting to grow a little busier as the day comes nearer to an end. He sees a lot of people scowling at his eagerness to pass them, and usually he’s not a fan of people who run around through crowds either, but he thinks he gets a free pass just this once. If they knew why he was hurrying, they’d probably agree.

“Do you have insurance?”

“I don’t even know what’s been taken, but no to insurance,” Pete says.

“Not any?” Patrick questions.

“Don’t have a car, no car insurance. Don’t have a house, no home insurance. Don’t have anything valuable, no insurance there. Health insurance only covers me, not my possessions. Renters insurance only covers natural disasters, so unless Frank burns down the apartment building, no coverage there either.”

“That’s not good,” Patrick says, which, if you ask Pete, is stating the obvious.

Pete’s normally quick on his feet, a childhood of soccer playing on his side, but today every step feels like it takes years to hit the ground. Every thunderous footstep is a life age and every breath comes shallow and painful. He sees the apartment building looming over him after what feels like years lost at sea and he can’t get to it quickly enough. He can’t pull the front door open, and run up the steps any faster than he is going, but he does is best anyway. 

Everything around him is all at once blurry and in high definition. He can’t look at the ground below him and yet he sees every scoff mark of every shoe that’s ever stepped through this hall. He can hear every creak of the building, and yet he can’t hear his own footsteps as the walls around him swallow the sound.

Pete throws open the door to their apartment, not particularly hard to do as the lock is broken in and hanging off of the door which is not good. But he can also hear Frank making a bawling sound from behind the door which is never ever a good thing to walk into, but it’s especially worse when you know and empathize with why that bawling is occurring in the first place.

“Frank?” Pete calls out.

Frank raises his hand like a teacher called on him in grade school, because he’s hiding behind the end of the couch which you can’t see from the door. Pete walks over to him, but looks around the apartment as he does so.

“Dude, so what’s gone?” 

“Laptops, our drug cabinet...” Frank whimpers after a few moments, and Pete looks down at him, his face stuffed into his knee so that Pete can’t see him. He’s not sure he really wants to, he’s seen Frank cry before, when they watched Titanic, he’s a particularly ugly crier. Most everyone is though so that’s not really a reflection on him specifically.

“Anything else?”

“Everything electronic. Blu-ray, movies, our fucking toaster, who the fuck steals a toaster?”

“Someone who really likes toast?” Pete suggests, feeling a sinking feeling settle in his stomach that he can only think to soothe with third-rate comedy.

“Is this the fucking time for jokes?” Frank snaps, looking up at Pete with an angry glint in his dark pupils. As he’d expected Frank’s face is red and puffy under the eyes, exactly how you would think someone who’s been crying to look. Pete hears the door being pushed aside and turns his head to see Patrick entering, looking a little winded, but then again Pete was probably running way faster than him, and Patrick didn’t know where their destination was so he had to keep up.

“I’m trying to... sorry,” Pete replies, “Why are you so upset, it’s my apartment?”

“Well it’s mine too,” Frank says grouchily, putting his face back in the space between his knees.

“Yeah, sorry,” Pete says, realizing that might’ve been a little short and rude. He’s generally the guy who tries to be the people pleaser while also trying to be the one who makes sure that everyone is having a good time, and those two usually go well together, but in situations where people are sad, he has a lot of difficulty finding where to stand. 

“Do you need me to call someone?” Patrick asks, speaking up, and Frank jumps the slightest bit, as he hadn’t known that Patrick was even there, but he recovers well and Pete pretends not to have noticed. “Your super, the police?”

“Well probably both, but I don’t know what either of them can do?” Pete says, “Like, can you find a laptop using a computer or something? I don’t even know, I’d need my fucking laptop to find out.” 

“Unfortunately you can’t track a laptop unless you pre-downloaded a software to do so,” Patrick says in a helpful tone which is sort of redundant as nothing he said is at all helpful.

“Why do you know th-”

“I had a friend who worked at a Best Buy,” Patrick replies to Pete’s question before he’s even finished asking it.

“Great so that’s literally no fucking help at all!” Frank announces.

“Seriously, Frank, I just got robbed too, is acting like a dick going to get you anywhere?”

“No,” Frank responds, “but I’m fucking angry.”

“I am too!” Pete says, “My entire fucking life was on that computer, of course I’m angry.”

“Do you not have backup hard drives?” Patrick asks.

“Okay seriously, Patrick, look around. Do you really think two guys who use plastic silverware have enough money to buy backup hard drives?”

“S-sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Pete says to Patrick, “Seriously, Frank, chill out a bit. I’m angry and upset too, but don’t behave like you’re a little kid.”

“But I am a little kid!” Frank says, violently putting his leg out in front of him and forcing his head up to look at Pete, but it’s not very threatening when you consider that he’s sitting on the ground and looking up at Pete who’s standing. “I’m still a fucking kid, okay?”

“You’re not even a teenager anymore,” Pete reminds him.

“No, but I’m allowed to get upset.”

“Yes, you are. I agree, you can get upset. Just don’t take it out on me, yeah?” Pete says.

“This lock is broken, I think you’re first call needs to be to a locksmith,” Patrick says, trying to take tension away from the matter at hand, unsuccessfully so it needs to be pointed out.

“Can we get one in tonight?” Pete asks. “It’s Friday, I imagine the chances aren’t high.”

“Well you can try, but I won’t make you any promises,” Patrick says, “You can use my computer if you have to, but I think that people used to use phonebooks for this in the olden days.”

“So there’s no way we can sleep here tonight then?” Pete asks.

“No fucking way am I going to stay here tonight,” Frank says, “I’ll go to my mom’s house before I sleep here.”

“Why?” Pete asks.

“It’s tainted!” Frank says loudly. “Everything! It’s fucking tainted. I can’t even look at this apartment at all without feeling like someone pissed all over everything. My entire sense of security, and mind you it was pretty flimsy to begin with because of this shithole of an apartment, is completely shattered.”

“Now that,” Patrick says, “I don’t blame you for in the slightest.”

“No, me neither,” Pete says, looking around and all of a sudden seeing the apartment through the lens of Frank’s eyes, and he feels kind of gross just looking at the barren walls and minimalistic furniture. He feels like he’s got bugs crawling over his skin just thinking about having to _stay_ here. He doesn’t want to be here a second longer, it feels so vile and wretched, and he now starts to really understand why Frank’s on the floor. It’s not even the material things that have got him so down, it’s the fact that everything has changed now. Everything is a putrid smell, everything looks dangerous and nothing is okay anymore.

“I have a spare bedroom,” Patrick says, “now granted, all I have is a cot, but, like, it’s still a room which is technically spare, and I also have a couch.”

“Are you suggesting that we sleep in your apartment, Patrick?” Frank asks, looking around the couch at him.

“Well you don’t have to use that tone,” Pete says, suddenly feeling like Frank’s mother, scrutinizing every word he says.

“It’s obvious that you can’t stay here!”

“But, like, you barely even know us,” Frank says. “Pete could be a serial killer.”

“I’m not though,” Pete says, then looks at Patrick and repeats, “I’m not.”

“You’re a little too smiley and clueless to be a serial killer.”

“Thank you. Wait what?” Pete asks.

“He’s right,” Frank sniffs, “you would never be able to kill a person without getting caught, let alone _serially_ kill people.”

Pete scoffs, “I could so totally... you know what never mind, I think it’s better to let you guys have this one. I think it’s better to not try to prove that I can be a serial killer.”

“Well, my point is that I’m not about to let you two stay in this place, especially if you can’t even look at it, and I have room, it’s honestly not a big deal.”

“It is a big deal,” Frank says, “it’s really nice, and we don’t deserve it.”

“Both of those statements are true, you really don’t have to, Patrick,” Pete adds.

“But I am volunteering it to you, because you need someone to be nice to you right now,” Patrick says, and Frank’s heart melts a little bit. He almost sees what Pete sees, but then he reminds himself of the fact that it’s gross liking the same things Pete likes, because Pete is Pete. Patrick is great and all, but he’s really more for Pete than he is anyone else.

“It’s kind of ironic that the worst thing anyone’s ever done to me happens to befall on the same day as the nicest thing anyone’s ever offered me,” Frank says quietly, and Pete literally feels his own shoulders drop at the sadness in that statement.

“Patrick, as much as I’d like to say that we can’t take you up on your offer, I’m afraid that we kind of have to, because there is no way I’m going to let Frank go to his moms,” Pete says. He knows that if Frank were to spend just one night at his mom’s house, she would somehow convince him to stay permanently, and he wouldn’t be allowed to do that without going back to college, because she’s definitely not happy about his having dropped out. But when Pete first saw Frank during college it was immediately clear that it has been killing him. He was just an emotionless, lifeless sack of tired old bones and Pete can’t have that happening again. College was literally one of the worst things that had ever happened to Frank, and Pete’s not going to let it ruin him again.

“Good,” Patrick nods, and Frank, vacantly staring at the wall behind Pete, makes a sound of agreement, which is all that they’re going to get out of him at all for the next few hours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comment maybe?


End file.
